CITY FOLK

As the first round of primary voting draws closer, and presidential candidates have all but established residences in Iowa and New Hampshire to shore up their votes, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz sure are spending a lot of time talking about New York.

Cruz, testing a new line of attack against the Queens-born Republican front-runner, who’s been hitting him even harder, has repeatedly mentioned Trump’s “New York values”—a notion that, judging by the way Cruz bites the words, those are a bad set of values to hold.

His first New York shade came Tuesday on the Howie Carr Show, when the host asked Cruz about Trump playing Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” You see, Trump has been engaging in some hometown shade-throwing of his own, floating the idea that Cruz might not be eligible for the role as commander in chief because he was born in Canada. Howie Carr wanted to know if Cruz thought Trump’s song choice was the billionaire businessman’s way of further twisting the knife.

“Well, look, I think he may shift in his new rallies to play ‘New York, New York’ because Donald comes from New York and he embodies New York values,” Cruz responded.

“The rest of the country knows exactly what New York values are, and I gotta say, they’re not Iowa values and they’re not New Hampshire values,” he said.

Trump, like any self-respecting New Yorker, and especially one who has his name splashed across buildings all up and down this fair city, couldn’t let that slide.

“When you want to knock New York, you’ve got to go through me,” he told Bloomberg in an interview, sounding more the mob boss or mayoral candidate than a presidential one. “New York is an amazing place with amazing people. We took a big hit with the World Trade Center—worst thing ever, worst attack ever in the United States, worse than Pearl Harbor because they attacked civilians, they attacked people having breakfast and frankly if you would've been there and if you would've lived through that like I did with New York people—the way they handled that attack was one of the most incredible things that anybody has ever seen.”

It could be time to remix “Empire State of Mind” or “New York State of Mind” or maybe even both with the addition of that new verse Trump fired off. Can someone call Jay Z?